Cool Homes: Burkhardt House painstakingly preserved

Effort restores historic Burkhardt House in the Rose Hill neighborhood

Dec. 31, 2013

The exterior view of Sandra Wilson's Swiss chalet-style home in North Avondale. / The Enquirer/Amanda Rossmann

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The 1904 Swiss chalet-style house on Beechwood Avenue in Cincinnati could have been clothier Andreas Erkenbrecher Burkhardt’s gift to his mother, younger sister and uncle.

Sandra Wilson’s preservation of that house 109 years later is a gift as well, this time to the elegant North Avondale neighborhood called Rose Hill that takes huge pride in its stately residences.

Wilson, who lives in Clifton Heights, has owned the Burkhardt House since the 2008 death of her father, Donald Parrish. She has been painstakingly preserving it for four years and has about six months to go before she’ll put down her tools and leave the rest – mostly the kitchen – to the house’s next shepherd.

For her efforts, Wilson in November received one of seven annual awards presented by the Cincinnati Preservation Association.

A lot of people, the CPA’s Margo Warminski said, would have walked away from a decaying place like the Burkhardt House.

“Let’s just say, most people don’t bother. It’s easier just to tear it down,” Warminski said. “But the work (Wilson) is doing on the house is phenomenal – preserving all the old fixtures, redoing the wood trim and hardwood floors and installing period lighting.”

“It was an old gem, and it really needed restoring,” said Wilson, an experienced house preserver. “It was my dad’s, and he had really let it go.

“I know how to refinish wood, put chains in windows, and I’m a pretty good painter,” Wilson said. But the gingerbread features of the 2˝-story house – all painted a nicked-up gunship gray – needed to be brought back to their Swiss chalet glory by a more experienced hand.

As she had several times before, Wilson turned to paint contractor Dave Ramos of Fairview Heights.

“I knew Dave could paint it,” Wilson said of Ramos, who picked up a brush about 30 years ago in college and has painted three of Wilson’s rental properties.

“That house of hers ...” Ramos said. “The only reason I tackled it is that it was a one in a million thing to do. It was a lot.”

Ramos, who moonlights as the bassist in the Cincinnati band Blessid Union of Souls, hired on John Wilnes to help him build 48-foot high, 16-foot wide scaffolding with two “picks” (planked levels on which to stand) that blocked the house all of last summer.

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The two stripped as much of the heavily layered paint as they could, resorting to heat guns at times. They discovered beautifully grained yellow pine siding on the third story that they palm-sanded and gave a log-cabin stain.

That log cabin look, Ramos said, inspired the color palette for the intricately carved details of the Swiss chalet-style facade: the spindled balcony and railing, the scalloped wood bands and lathe-turned posts.

Books on Victorian “painted ladies” like those in Columbia Tusculum showed him many options, but he found their combinations of red, green, yellow and blue “too cheery.”

He studied photos of cabins in alpine Germany and liked their rich, earth tones. And he admired the old timber look of many houses in Mariemont.

The layers of brown, black, yellow and gold-green over red paint applied to the facade were all Ramos’ choices.

“I actually designed every single detail. Every single color came out of my head,” said Ramos.

Using Pratt & Lambert paint, he applied no fewer than three coats so the job would last for decades, precisely adding subtle accent details within an organic palette of 17 colors.

“I wanted it so you can’t see the details from the street, but when you walk up, they become apparent. I didn’t want there to be too much to take in.”

He’s especially proud of how the third floor turned out.

“That upper pick (scaffolding walk board), that’s the best thing I’ve ever done,” Ramos said. “Just to make it not overbearing was the hardest thing.”

The Burkhardts: A splintered family

In the middle of the Gay Nineties, A.E. and Emma Burkhardt, parents of Andreas, split up after some 25 years of marriage.

At about the same time, the family business – once the nation’s largest dealer of raw furs – fell into the hands of creditors after it could not rebound from an 1891 fire that destroyed its seven-floor store at Fourth and Elm streets, Downtown.

To save the business, Emma borrowed $15,500 and put up her jewelry as collateral to buy what was left of A.E. Burkhardt Co. at auction.

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She renamed it Burkhardt Bros. and turned it over to Andreas, by then in his mid-20s, to manage with another son, Carl. It would thrive for decades at Fourth and Vine streets until closing in the 1980s.

(A.E., a German immigrant who started selling hats from a Cincinnati street cart as an orphan teen, moved into the Burnet House, Downtown, and formed his own furrier company.)

The fact that Emma was listed as a widow in the U.S. Census of 1900, even though A.E. was very much alive, speaks to the intensity of the rift between the Burkhardts, as does their vacating their 33-room Samuel Hannaford-built mansion on Forest Avenue in Avondale.

Emma moved to North Avondale, where she lived in several fine homes until dying in 1916 while residing in the Andreas Burkhardt House on Beechwood. A.E. died the next year while living in the Hotel Gibson, Downtown. His Spring Grove Cemetery death card lists him as a widower, indicating he might not have legally divorced Emma.

The separation of the Burkhardts seems to have extended beyond husband and wife. A visit to family burial lots at Spring Grove Cemetery hint at where their children’s allegiances fell. The five Burkhardt children are buried in three plots that are located nowhere near each other.

• Emma Erkenbrecher and children Andreas, Carl and Beatrice are buried in the prominent plot of starch company owner and Cincinnati Zoo founder Andrew Erkenbrecher, Emma’s father.

• Cornelius, an executive in the Cincinnati hotel business of his father-in-law, Albert G. Corre, took a neutral position and is buried with his wife in the Corre family plot.

• Webster, the youngest of the four boys, sided with his father – who was also his boss – and is buried in the A.E. Burkhardt plot along with about 20 relatives.

Swiss chalet: 1885 to 1910

The city of Cincinnati’s website (www.cincinnati-oh.gov) describes the style that influenced residential architecture throughout the region in neighborhoods such as East Walnut Hills, Hyde Park and Oakley:

Some houses were built entirely of wood. Others are brick, stone or stucco with wood upper floors or brick with stucco upper floors. On early chalets, wood siding – both vertical and horizontal – is ornately carved and often painted. Also characteristic is a decorative treatment of boards integrated with siding material that appears to expose post-and-beam construction.

The ends of rafters and purlins (structural braces that are part of the roof support system) are generally exposed and are sometimes carved and painted, Front porches were often featured on later examples of the style, which are otherwise less elaborate than the highly decorative earlier homes.

The Swiss chalet style, never widespread in the United States, appears to have enjoyed some celebrity in Cincinnati. The American version of the style was derived from the Swiss cottage form traditional among Alp-dwellers for hundreds of years. It is publicized by Andrew Jackson Downing in “The Architecture of Country Houses” (1850), a best-selling style book that did much to popularize other romantic styles such as the Gothic Revival.

The style came into vogue in Cincinnati in the late part of the 19th century. Lucian Plympton, an architect who practiced in Cincinnati in the 1880s and ’90s, was influential in spreading Swiss Chalet locally.

Last Burkhardt in the house

Records suggest that Beatrice Burkhardt Fisher, Andreas’ only sister, was the last of the family to live in the Beechwood Avenue house.

For many of the eight or so years she was there, Beatrice’s uncle Albert Erkenbrecher lived with her and was listed as head of the household in the Census.

A 1919 Cincinnati directory listed Beatrice as head of the household. Her mother died in 1916 at age 65 while living in the house, and her uncle died in 1921 at age 62.

By 1923, a city directory listed Beatrice as residing in Crescent Court Apartments on Reading Road in Avondale. Likely, that was the year the 45-year-old Beatrice married William E. Fisher. The union was short-lived. He died of heart trouble in 1926.

Her Spring Grove Cemetery death card indicates Beatrice jumped out a window to her death at age 53 on May 5, 1931.